Headquartered in San Francisco, Esurance is a direct-to-consumer insurance company serving approximately 500,000 customers in 30 states. The company combines web technology and industry expertise to offer auto insurance coverage with 24/7 customer service and claims handling through its 12 regional offices across the United States. Esurance also has over a hundred work-at-home representatives who handle sales and service for the company. This effort has been well-received by Esurance associates in the program, and allows the company to staff appropriately to meet the 24/7 service expectations of its customers. With a distributed network of associates across multiple locations, Esurance strives to have maximum data security wherever its associates are located.

Symantec Data Loss Prevention helps Esurance reduce the risk of data loss and protect sensitive customer data wherever it is being used or stored. Esurance has a mobile workforce that uses a variety of removable media devices that can be more vulnerable to security threats. Protecting data at the endpoint is especially critical for the company.

“We needed a comprehensive data loss prevention solution that would enable us to prevent unauthorized copying of files to USBs, CDs, and other portable hardware,” says David Aflak, senior manager of network operations, Esurance. “Symantec gives us visibility into USB usage across endpoints, including laptops and remote systems, without interfering with the activities of our business users.”

Symantec Data Loss Prevention monitors and blocks endpoint activity that violates data security policies. For example, if an employee tries to copy a file to a USB drive in violation of a company policy, the attempt is blocked and the employee receives a pop-up message box indicating that they have violated a data security policy, providing real-time employee education.

“The set of products in the Symantec DLP suite was built from the ground up to work together, so we can implement security policies and procedures once, continuing to use them as we expanded our data protection efforts,” says Aflak. “We were able to start at the endpoint - the most critical area for us – and quickly move to email and web monitoring and prevention. This saved us considerable time.”